Peter Baxter Africa  »  African Travel • General

Some personal reflections on African travel

Kilimanjaro Western Breach Summit: A Viable Option For Older Climbers

April 19, 2012
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ShareSeparating the Fact from the Fiction There has long been an aura of risk about climbing Kilimanjaro via the famed Western Breach. The matter came to a head in early 2005 with the death of three American climbers as a consequence of a rockfall. The route was briefly closed and assessed, perhaps more an act [...]

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Champion of The Kilimanjaro Forests: Sebastian Chuwa

March 22, 2012

ShareTanzania is at the vortex of the African tourist industry, positioned equidistant from everywhere, and packed with just about everything that anyone needs to see of Africa in a compact fortnight’s worth of travel. The integrity and standards of preservation of Tanzania’s national parks are almost unique in Africa, and with iconic names like Serengeti [...]

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Mount Kilimanjaro Crater Camp Abuse

March 22, 2012

ShareThe current buzz in Kilimanjaro is the imminent closure of Crater Camp. I discovered this on my most recent trip when a few mates and I summited via the Western Breach and spent a long and ugly night at Crater Camp. Crater Camp is touted as the last word in isolation on the slightly over-trammeled [...]

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Rourkes Drift and Isandlwana: Key sites of the Anglo Zulu War of 1879

January 1, 2012
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ShareDeep in the signature countryside of Zululand – undulating grassland punctuated by rubble crowned kopjies and shallow river valleys – lie two key sites in the mythology of the black/white struggle for Southern Africa. The Anglo/Zulu War in many respects was the beginning of the end of black independent monarchy in Southern Africa. It came [...]

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A second look at South Africa Travel: A thinking person’s alternative

December 20, 2011
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This entry is part 5 of 8 in the series Heritage & Cultural Travel in Africa

ShareAs a travel destination South Africa has a few key advantages and disadvantages The main disadvantage the country suffers is violent crime. This is balanced out, however, by the fact that the South African travel industry is finely tuned, highly efficient and well regulated. The chances are thus very slim that dusk might ever find [...]

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Food & Wine in the Mother City of Cape Town

December 20, 2011
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This entry is part 8 of 8 in the series Heritage & Cultural Travel in Africa

ShareFine food and wine has been a tradition at the Cape since founding of the first European settlement In fact it was when the first administrator, Jan van Riebeeck, produced the very first recorded Cape wine, noted down as the year 1659. An extremely fertile industry was  founded at that moment that has been built [...]

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A quick look at South African music

December 20, 2011
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This entry is part 6 of 8 in the series Heritage & Cultural Travel in Africa

ShareThe taxonomy of the local South African music industry is divided most cleanly along the line of race South Africa’s social mindset is informed by race. While this is in fact true for all the countries of Africa that experienced permanent white settlement, South Africa was settled more comprehensively by Europeans over a very long [...]

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The South African Festival and Music Scene

December 20, 2011
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This entry is part 7 of 8 in the series Heritage & Cultural Travel in Africa

ShareSplashy Fen Legend has it that two friends, Peter Ferraz and Bart Fokkens, were sitting around over a beer one evening in 1990, discussing the decline of the great music festivals of yore. Concluding that the moment had come to reverse this trend the two decided then and there to found a festival in the [...]

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Experience Africa History Through Travel

December 17, 2011
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This entry is part 4 of 8 in the series Heritage & Cultural Travel in Africa

ShareThe brave new frontier of venture travel in the rapidly expanding heritage/history market. This is perfectly configured for the Baby Boomer age group who have the money, a wider world view than their parents and a cerebral view of travel. The heritage market has some obvious and evergreen candidates that will always be at the [...]

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South African Cultural Monuments: The Aparheid Museum and the Voortrekker Memorial

December 15, 2011
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This entry is part 3 of 8 in the series Heritage & Cultural Travel in Africa

ShareIn South Africa the Politics of Revolution and Cultural Tourism Collide. Every lodge and hotel in Johannesburg or Pretoria offers come variant of the Soweto Tour, and of course it is impossible to complete a visit to the Mother City of Cape Town without a trip across the bay to the penal settlement of Robben [...]

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Robben Island: A Legacy of the Anti-Apartheid Struggle

December 14, 2011
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This entry is part 2 of 8 in the series Heritage & Cultural Travel in Africa

SharePrison Islands occupy a particularly sordid place in the macabre history of crime and punishment. Thanks to the searing autobiography of French detainee Henri Charriere, entited Papillon, or the Butterfly, Devil’s Island has become one of these. The entire Australian continent also lays claim to a penal history. One supposes that the fact of confining [...]

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A Brief Look at the History and Culture of Tanzania

December 14, 2011
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This entry is part 1 of 8 in the series Heritage & Cultural Travel in Africa

ShareAmong African nations Tanzania has an extremely strong history and cultural heritage. It is here that evidence of the earliest human development has been found, where one of the greatest campaigns of World War I was fought, where one of the great oriental dynasties created a sultanate, and where some of the more memorable tussles [...]

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Rwenzori Mountains of Central Africa

September 13, 2011
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ShareRwenzori Gallery, my last trip there in 2006 The Mountains of the Moon One of the last secrets of accessible African venture travel is the famed Central African Mountains Of The Moon. The Rwenzori Range, straddling DRC and Uganda, is a rugged range of snowcapped peaks that, although not the highest in Africa, are without [...]

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Mountain climbing and hiking for Baby Boomers in Africa

August 18, 2011
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ShareClimbing and Hiking in Africa is great for boomers There are two words that will put in a nutshell why climbing and hill walking in Africa is so feasible for oldies: climate and porters. Lightweight survival kit is all you will ever need, and there is usually someone close at hand willing and able, and [...]

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The Chimanimani Mountains of Zimbabwe

August 18, 2011
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Share Buried somewhere in my memories of childhood is an image of that broken ridge deep in the hazy distance during fire season, as the family drove between Chipinga and Melsetter sometime in the early 1970s. Those were the days before the war, before convoys, landmines, ambushes and all the rest of it; when the [...]

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Sustainable Travel In Africa and what it really means

August 19, 2010

ShareSustainable Travel is more than a simple effort to ensure that activities and facilities are conceived and constructed in a manner that limits environmental impact. Of course this is important, and is a basic prerequisite for acceptable standards of sustainability, but far more important are the conservation  aspects of eco tourism as a travel concept; [...]

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Leaving the Serengeti and what it all means?

July 28, 2010

Share Captured this lad having a dust bath in the ashes of a burned tree The lions of the Grumeti Reserve have something to say Lately there have been three discontented lions roaming the perimeter of camp in the early hours of the morning, articulating with various leonine grunts and bellows, some lingering grievance against the [...]

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Grumeti Reserve and Tanzanian Eco Travel

July 25, 2010

ShareA comment in spearswms.com sums up very well the new conservation culture here in the Grumeti Wildlife Reserve of Tanzania, and indeed in many other places in the more travelled zones of Africa. In an article entitled Land of Opportunity, writer Caroline Phillips remarked that: ‘The new luxury in Africa is less about sublime lodges [...]

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The Tamarind Tree

July 19, 2010

ShareThis morning I was attracted to a particularly robust and handsome tree situated in an expanse of grassland not too far from the river bank. What caught my eye first was the red flash of a woodpecker’s crest as it dove into the deep cover of a fine and dense canopy. As I investigated further I [...]

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An Evening with the Zebra

July 15, 2010

ShareA short cycle of seasons    The fire season in the Grumeti Wildlife Reserve of the Serengeti experiences a very rapid transition from wet to dry season. This is because of the fact that on the equator in Africa two distinct wet seasons take place. These are the Long Rains, from which we have just emerged, [...]

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Colobus monkeys, a regular in the Grumeti Wildlife Reserve

July 8, 2010

ShareOne of the most interesting creatures commonly seen on a game drive in the Grumeti Wildlife Reserve is the Guereza Colobus monkey, or Colobus guereza, a gorgeous pied primate of the upper gallery forest.  The Colbus is a fairly widespread inhabitant of Africa with olive, red and white varieties and a wide variation within those [...]

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Fire on the bushveld

July 4, 2010

Share This guy had been hanging around alone for a while. Weak specimens rarely last long on the veld  The acacia woodland of the northern Serengeti National Park and the Grumeti and Ikorongo Wildlife Reserves are very prone to fire and experience perhaps a 50 to 60 percent annual burn. In East Africa the seasons [...]

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Elephants of the Grumeti Wildlife Reserve

July 4, 2010

ShareThe Grumeti Wildlife Reserve of Northern Tanzania is not one of the most concentrated game area in the region, and certainly you will not see the vigorous populations of antelope and other African wildlife associated with the nearby Serengeti National Park. However you never know when you will run into a delightful surprise. This happened [...]

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Birding in the Grumeti Wildlife Reserve, Tanzania

July 1, 2010

ShareThe Grumeti Wildlife Reserve in Northern Tanzania is one of the buffer zones associated with the Serengeti National Park. In a nutshell the Serengeti/Mara Ecosystem comprises the range of the great wildebeest migration. This exceeds the range of the Serengeti National Park itself, and in fact overspills into ostensibly populated areas. By way of a compromise [...]

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Fire on the veld…

June 25, 2010

ShareI recall one night sitting on the stoep and supping a beer with a friend as we gazed at a fire raging across the flanks of the Chimanimani Mountains. The fire was burning some distance away, but the scene was nonetheless extremely dramatic. ‘Fires always look worse at night.’ I remarked to my friend, Doof [...]

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Back behind the wheel of a Land Rover…

June 24, 2010

ShareThis month was one of revisiting old memories with the arrival of the open-top vehicle that we will be using for game drives around the Reserve. This is a Series 110 Land Rover of perhaps 1995 vintage and acquired as part of a large consignment from the Singapore Army. It has been made over fairly [...]

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Serengeti Shall Not Die

June 8, 2010

ShareWhen I finally boarded an aircraft at PDX after grappling for almost a week with flight delays and diversions, thanks to the European volcanic ash saga, I had under my arm a companion book that I thought was quite appropriate for this journey.  In the late 1950s Bernhard Grzimek, a German biologist, conservation zealot and [...]

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Chimanimani under pressure

June 6, 2010

ShareIf a certain weariness has come to characterize the global response to the African crisis it is not without some justification There are indeed times when crisis seems to be the one denominator that is common to the whole region, and so, when another incidence is added to the lengthy list, especially one with merely [...]

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